Iyer was born Siddharth Pico
Raghavan Iyer in Oxford,
England, the son of Indian parents. His father
was Raghavan N. Iyer,
an Oxford philosopher
and political theorist, and his mother the religious scholar Nandini Nanak
Mehta. Both his parents are academics who grew up in India, thereafter went to
England for college education and stayed there.His
unusual name is a combination of the Buddha's name, Siddhartha, that of the
Florentine neo-Platonist Pico della
Mirandola and his father's name. When he was seven, in 1964, his
father who taught philosophy at Oxford, started working with Center for the
Study of Democratic Institutions, a California-based think
tank, thus the family also moved to California, as he started teaching at University of
California, Santa Barbara (1965-1986). Thus for more than a decade
he moved back and forth several times a year between schools and college in England and his parents'
home in California. He won academic scholarships to Eton, Oxford University and Harvard — graduating with
a Congratulatory Double First at Oxford, with the highest marks in the
university.

He taught writing and literature at Harvard before joining Time
in 1982 as a writer on world affairs. Since then he has traveled widely, from North Korea to Easter Island, and from Paraguay to Ethiopia, while writing
eight works of non-fiction and two novels, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The
Lady and the Monk, The Global
Soul and The Man Within My Head.
He is also a contributor to the New York Review
of Books, and is a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University.

* tries to show us that
‘liberalism was born’ in Amsterdam, which ‘has influenced the modern world to a
degree that perhaps no other city has.’

* One minute we’re reading about
the transformation of the herring industry, and four pages later about Martin
Luther, whose theses ‘set off a tidal wave that rolled 400 miles due west and
crashed head-on into the medieval town walls of Amsterdam.’

* the looseness of the language
seems to speak for an imprecision in the thinking.

* The
core of his argument seems to be the notion that Amsterdam both gave unique
freedom to the individual and patented a rare mix of individual enterprise and
community spirit (though some of us might discover this in Confucius 2,000 years
before). ‘I do find it compelling,’ he writes of Matthijs van Boxsel, that he ‘and
other Dutch writers see the historic struggle against water as formative to a
cultural ethic of cooperation that created a society strong enough for it to
impel, curiously, a commitment to value the individual.’

If that sounds confusing, the
other formulations of the book’s central idea are even more so. And much of the
reasoning does not repay close scrutiny: ‘Amsterdam was an oligarchy,’ we’re
assured, seven pages before being reminded of ‘the egalitarian nature of Dutch
society.’

* The problem is that Shorto’s grand ideas seem to be superimposed upon
his material rather than to flow out of it, as if he had his thesis before he
had any facts.

* The
deeper problem, for those of us interested in the city from afar, is that
Shorto’s rather rosy take on familiar material has to compete with much more
rounded and unillusioned perspectives of Dutch-born locals. For example, Ian
Buruma’s ‘Murder in Amsterdam,’ from 2006, is a typically supple and searching
examination of the shadow sides of tolerance, including all the ways it can
lead to its opposite…. Having spent the first 24 years of his life in his
father’s country — he still carries a Dutch passport — Buruma has a stake in thinking
seriously about whether ‘freedom of speech’ simply leads to public vilification
of Muslims and Jews.

* The
oddity of ‘Amsterdam’ is that it is at once too narrow and too unfocused. Since
Shorto almost never looks outside Amsterdam and the Netherlands, his claims for
their distinctiveness become self-­fulfilling.

* If
liberalism is taken to refer not just to a philosophical principle but to the
freedom to do what one likes, there are many places on earth more lawless and
wide-open than Amsterdam.

* Mr. Shorto acknowledges... thatthe Dutch could accommodate
themselves to the Nazis in part because for years they’d maintained a ‘pillar
system’ that left Catholics, Protestants, socialists and liberals segregated
from one another. But what he continues to talk about is how his beloved city
enjoys ‘probably the most sophisticated urban bicycle system in the world’ and
became ‘the spliff center of the universe.’ (Take that, Tangier, Varanasi,
Vancouver and, for that matter, Mars!) By the end, he’s suggesting that the
very fact that ‘a larger percentage of Jews here were killed than almost
anywhere else’ during World War II might be one of the building-blocks of
Amsterdam’s contemporary liberalism. One shudders at the implications.

At the end of the nineteenth century this oppressive cultivating system was gradually abandoned. This was the result of many protests by ex-colonial administrators or ordinary visitors to Indonesia who reported on the terrible abuses of the system in books or the press. The most effective protest was made by Eduard Douwes Dekker, a fired colonial administrator, who in a book called Max Havelaardescribed in detail the suppression of the native population by the colonial administration.

But, although the colonial rulers had tightened their controls over the local population, it had not abandoned the concept that it was best to maintain the traditional society. It continued to support thepryayi,ruled "indirectly" through the aristocracy, using the peoples' own value system as laid down in the traditional system of theadat.

The new attitude of the Colonial Government at the beginning of this century was therefore not only formed by the protests at home against the oppression of the native colony.39At no time did the new policy, which came to be know as the "Etische Politiek" (Ethical Policy) constitute a break with the past. It only tried to do away with the most obvious abuses, while at the same time making the colony more "open" to the new capitalist entrepreneurs. The government talked about the setting up of a so-called "protective barrier" between the native farmers and the Western entrepreneur, but as shown earlier, the government ultimately always supported the capitalists. As a result the

policies of the Colonial Government aimed at reform remained ambiguous. As Hadji Agus Salim wrote: "reforming concepts, magnificently constructed in the minds of the noble Dutchman, (are) at implementation deformed into a caricature of themselves under the influence of selfishness, as a result of the natural instinct of preservation of those groups, which in the mother-country, under changing political constellations, control the political relationships (between Holland and Indonesia) sometimes with more, sometimes with less benevolence, groups which in character have remained the same throughout times, from the monopolistic East-India Company, through forced cultivation, and free labour, till today."40

With the introduction of the "Etische Politiek", the system of indirect rule was coming to an end, and now the local population came face to face with the colonial administrator or the European entrepreneur. He soon realised who his real exploiters were and as a result became more militant.

Instead of lessening agitation, the Volksraad actually stiffened nationalist sentiments because any effort to achieve genuine progress through it was frustrated. Either the European and Indo-European elements, who together formed a majority voted against bills advocating improvements, or the colonial administration ignored the advice given.In response to this rising militancy, which was also motivated by events elsewhere in Asia, and in response to socialist agitation in the mother country, generated by the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, the DutchGovernment was willing to make some concessions after 1917. In 1918, an advisory council or Volksraad (Peoples Council) was established. It was partially elected, partially appointed. Half of the seats went to Indonesians, of which several were appointed by the government. Although the government did appoint members of several nationalist parties, the recipients were often discredited by being appointed.40a

Regardless of the Volksraad, the colonial Government remained oppressive. There was a separation between "Herrenvolk" and natives, based on confusing race theories, while at the same time the government did recognise Eurasians as being legally equal to Europeans.4lBut as the economy was concentrated in the hands of a few and the government closely tied-in, the result was a type of of "corporate state" based on a capitalist system of exploitation. The Governor-General ruled through "Governor-in-Council" acts. There was no real internal policy making and the principle of trias politica was never recognised.42Instead, the Colonial Government employed another trinity: the General Prosecutor, the Perintah Alus (Secret Police), and Boven-Digul, a political concentration camp in the swamps of New Guinea. Fascism was popular among the Dutch in Indonesia and in the thirties the Nationaal Socialistische Beweging (National Socialist Movement), the Dutch branch of the Nazi organisation, had many supporters in the colony.

Zwarte Piet and the Colonial Inheritance: The Roots of Dutch Racism-Denial

November 15, 2013

The controversial painting “A Tribute to the Colonies” (1898) adorns the side of the “Golden Coach” in which the Dutch queen annually rides, in her capacity as head of state, on the day in September (“Prinsjesdag”) in which she makes the annual budget public. Painted 36 years after the abolition of formal slavery, it depicts contented black coolies humbly offering the fruits of their labors to the queen and her assistants clad in ancient Greek attire–and a child among them gratefully receiving a book in return. To the right (symbolizing the East of the Empire), the queen is greeted by more formally-dressed and reservedly respectful members of the Indonesian aristocracy. Indonesian coolies bow lower behind them. Few visual images are so direct in their representation of the “civilizing mission” of Dutch colonialism–and its hierarchies. But contemporary debates over the painting’s significance and appropriateness as an ongoing symbol of state have remained caught up in a near-exclusive focus on its connection to the institution of slavery, allowing other aspects of colonialism’s broader social and ideological legacy to remain comfortably in the shadows. Similar problems of Dutch post-colonial myopia are evident in debates surrounding the increasingly controversial holiday figure “Black Pete.”

vrijdag 3 januari 2014

'The Country You Destroyed': A Letter to George W. Bush

U.S. President George W. Bush addresses the nation March 19, 2003 in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC. Bush announced that the U.S. military struck at “targets of opportunity” in Iraq March 19, 2003 in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)George W. BushGeorge W. Bush Presidential CenterPO Box 560887Dallas, Texas, 57356

Dear Mr. Bush:

A few days ago I received a personalized letter from your Presidential Center which included a solicitation card for donations that actually provided words for my reply. They included “I’m honored to help tell the story of the Bush Presidency” and “I’m thrilled that the Bush Institute is advancing timeless principles and practical solutions to the challenges facing our world.” (Below were categories of “tax-deductible contributions” starting with $25 and going upward.)

Did you mean the “timeless principles” that drove you and Mr. Cheney to invade the country of Iraq which, contrary to your fabrications, deceptions and cover-ups, never threatened the United States? Nor could Iraq [under its dictator and his dilapidated military] threaten its far more powerful neighbors, even if the Iraqi regime wanted to do so.

Today, Iraq remains a country (roughly the size and population of Texas) you destroyed, a country where over a million Iraqis, including many children and infants (remember Fallujah?) lost their lives, millions more were sickened or injured, and millions more were forced to become refugees, including most of the Iraqi Christians. Iraq is a country rife with sectarian strife that your prolonged invasion provoked into what is now open warfare. Iraq is a country where al-Qaeda is spreading with explosions taking 20, 30, 40, 50 or 60 lives per day. Just this week, it was reported that the U.S. has sent Hellfire air-to-ground missiles to Iraq’s air force to be used against encampments of “the country’s branch of al-Qaeda.” There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq before your invasion. Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were mortal enemies.

The Bush/Cheney sociocide of Iraq, together with the loss of tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers’ lives, countless injuries and illnesses, registers, with the passage of time, no recognition by you that you did anything wrong nor have you accepted responsibility for the illegality of your military actions without a Congressional declaration of war. You even turned your back on Iraqis who worked with U.S. military occupation forces as drivers, translators etc. at great risk to themselves and their families and were desperately requesting visas to the U.S., often with the backing of U.S. military personnel. Your administration allowed fewer Iraqis into the U.S. than did Sweden in that same period and far, far fewer than Vietnamese refugees coming to the U.S. during the nineteen seventies.

When you were a candidate, I called you a corporation running for the Presidency masquerading as a human being. In time you turned a metaphor into a reality. As a corporation, you express no remorse, no shame, no compassion and a resistance to admit anything other than that you have done nothing wrong.

Day after day Iraqis, including children, continue to die or suffer terribly. When the paraplegic, U.S. army veteran, Tomas Young, wrote you last year seeking some kind of recognition that many things went horribly criminal for many American soldiers and Iraqis, you did not deign to reply, as you did not deign to reply to Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son, Casey, in Iraq. As you said, “the interesting thing about being the president” is that you “don’t feel like [you] owe anybody an explanation.” As a former President, nothing has changed as you make very lucrative speeches before business groups and, remarkably, ask Americans for money to support your “continued work in public service.”

Pollsters have said that they believe a majority of Iraqis would say that life today is worse for them than under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. They would also say George W. Bush left Iraq worse off than when he entered it, despite the U.S. led sanctions prior to 2003 that took so many lives of Iraqi children and damaged the health of so many civilian families.

Your national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, said publically in 2012 that while “the arc of history” may well turn out better for post-invasion Iraq than the present day violent chaos, she did “take personal responsibility” for the casualties and the wreckage. Do you?

Can you, at the very least, publically urge the federal government to admit more civilian Iraqis, who served in the U.S. military occupation, to this country to escape the retaliation that has been visited on their similarly-situated colleagues? Isn’t that the minimum you can do to very slightly lessen the multiple, massive blowbacks that your reckless military policies have caused? It was your own anti-terrorism White House adviser, Richard Clarke, who wrote in his book, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, soon after leaving his post, that the U.S. played right into Osama bin Laden’s hands by invading Iraq.

Are you privately pondering what your invasion of Iraq did to the Iraqis and American military families, the economy and to the spread of al-Qaeda attacks in numerous countries?

Sincerely yours,

Ralph Nader

P.S. I am enclosing as a contribution in kind to your presidential center library the bookRogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions by Clyde Prestowitz (2003) whom I’m sure you know. Note the positive remark on the back cover by General Wesley Clark.

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